Fernando ( 5. 6. 3774 – 75 ). But while the Spaniard now separates blood from
blood, ordering his men to remove the Moor’s body “while his blood streams
forth” and claiming the “Hereditary right, to the Royall Spanish throne
usurp’d by him” ( 5. 6. 3795 – 99 ), he does so in the dress, makeup, and footsteps
of a Moor. And not only does he, like Eleazar, accept and rely on the support
of the Queen Mother, whose name, but not past, Philip clears with a poten-
tially compromising pardon. In order to “end a Tragedie” “with Comick joy,”
he “contract[s] [his] sister unto” the still disguised Hortenso, recreating visu-
ally the marriage of Spaniard and Moor that has given Eleazar a legitimating
edge in the Spanish court ( 5. 6. 3810 – 11 ). It is after these performances that
Philip’s restorative order to banish “all the Moors” may come. But with or
without it, the tragedy ends with an unsettling irony of the Spanish prince re-
claiming Spain in the indelible image of the Moor. If part of the effect is to
suggest the “theatricality of blackness,” it is also to underscore the revealing
mimicry that defines and destabilizes Spain.^25
No wonder, then, that this is world that would banish all its Moors, writ-
ing them into an absolutely expendable and alienable race. For this one Bar-
barian’s inimitable rise to power exposes the permeability not simply of Spain’s
borders and bodies but also of its defining identities and ideologies. As arbiter
of the royal bloodline, Eleazar, the king of Spain, is also symbolically, if tem-
porarily, the Spanishking. In thinking of this tragic end, we might think back
to the play’s beginning, to the fantasy of banishment that catalyzed the crisis
of state in the first place. In the face of Mendoza’s order, Eleazar insists that
he can insinuate himself anywhere. “Hah! Banish me, s’foot, why say they
do,” he argues, in the vein of Thomas Stukeley:
Ther’s Portugal a good air, & France a fine Country;
Or Barbary rich, and has Moors; the Turke
Pure Divell, and allowes enough to fat
The sides of villainy; good living there:
I can live there, and there, and there,
Troth ’tis, a villain can live any where. ( 1. 4. 553 – 61 )Underlying his global fantasy is the assumption that his role as villain gives
him a sure way in to any culture (including his native Barbary, which, notably,
he does not acknowledge as such). Yet if his villainy is never in question, as it
clearly is not, neither is it the point. For what secures and defines Eleazar’s
place in Spain is not simply his own crafty malevolence but the inherent per-
136 chapter five